K. Christopher Beard

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Kenneth Christopher Beard (born January 24, 1962 ) is an American paleontologist . He is the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History , with particular research on the evolutionary origins of primates (monkeys).

Life

Beard received his PhD in Functional Anatomy and Evolution from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1989 . His doctoral thesis was Postcranial Anatomy, Locomotor Adaptations, and Paleoecology of Early Cenozoic Plasiadapidae, Paromomyidae, and Micromomyidae (Eutheria, Dermoptera) . In addition to his position at the Carnegie Museum, he is Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Pittsburgh ( Mary R. Dawson Chair ).

In his book The hunt for the dawn monkey he takes the view that the origins of primates are much earlier than previously thought and are to be found in Asia rather than Africa. To this end, he examined fossil finds from China and Mongolia in particular.

He was one of the discoverers of the earliest North American finds of Teilhardina and of Eosimias one of the earliest higher primates ( anthropoids ) ever found . Together with Chinese and American scientists, he found 45 million year old foot bones (ankles) of Eosimias in China, of which only the jaws and teeth were known until then. They made it possible to classify them as transitional forms from monkeys to higher primates, as the ankle showed that they preferred four-legged locomotion in trees like higher apes. They also supported the hypothesis of an origin of higher primates by the tarsiers instead of the lemurs -like Adapidae .

In 2009 he described Ganlea megacanina as a possible ancestor of the anthropoids after a find in Burma, which further substantiated the hypothesis of the origin of higher apes in Asia. According to Beard, the 38 million year old finds also showed an affiliation with the extinct Amphipitecidae and not with Adapiformes like the Ida ( Darwinia ) from the Messel pit, described earlier in 2009 but found in 1983 . The high specialization in hard-shell fruits (similar to the sakis in the Amazon basin) is, according to Beard, an indication of the closer relationship between the Amphipitecidae and the anthropoids.

With Jean-Jacques Jaeger and others, he also found the earliest known Eocene branching of anthropoids in Africa in finds from Libya. Since the finds come from three different families and there are no older finds in Africa, which was then surrounded by the sea, Beard and his colleagues see this as evidence that the precursors of higher primates came from Asia.

Beard also deals with the mammalian evolution in North America at the turn of Paleocene to Eocene .

In 2000 he was a MacArthur Fellow .

Fonts

  • The hunt for the dawn monkey. Unearthing the origins of monkeys, apes and humans . University of California Press, Berkeley 2004 (The book received the WW Howells Book Award from the American Anthropological Association and the 2005 Science Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society)
  • with Shawn M. Lehman, John G. Fleagle (Eds.): Primate Biogeography: Progress and Prospects . Springer, 2006
  • Basal anthropoids . In: Walter Carl Hartwig (Ed.): The primate fossil record . Cambridge University Press, 2002
  • Early Wasatchian mammals from the gulf coastal plain of Mississippi . In: Gregg F. Gunnell (Ed.): Eocene biodiversity: unusual occurences and rarely sampled habitats . Springer, 2001
  • with Mary R. Dawson (Ed.): Dawn of the age of mammals in Asia . Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 1998

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Beard et al. a .: The oldest North American primate and mammalian biogeography during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Volume 105, 2008, p. 3815. Teilhardina magnoliana from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Tuscahoma Formation
  2. ^ Dan Gebo, Marian Dagosto, Christopher Beard, Qui Tao, Wang Jingwen: The oldest known anthropoid postcranial fossils and the early evolution of higher primates . In: Nature , Volume 404, 2000, pp. 276–278, PMID 10749208 , related website ( memento of the original from April 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.niu.edu
  3. ↑ Beard et al. a. The eosimiid primates (Anthropoidea) of the Heti Formation, Yuanqu Basin, Shanxi and Henan Provinces, People's Republic of China . In: Journal of Human Evolution , 46, No. 4, March 2004, pp. 401-432
  4. ↑ Limestone formations in Shanxi Province on the Yellow River, 160 km west of Shanghai
  5. ↑ from the Eocene
  6. ↑ Beard et al. a .: A new primate from the Eocene Pondaung Formation of Myanmar and the monophyly of Burmese amphipithecids . In: Proc. Roy. Soc. B , Volume 276, 2009, pp. 3285-3249
  7. ↑ New Fossil Primate Suggests Common Asian Ancestor, Challenges Primates Such As "Ida" . In: Science Daily , July 1, 2009
  8. ↑ 38 to 39 million years old
  9. ↑ Jaeger, Beard et al. a. Late middle Eocene epoch of Libya yields earliest known radiation of African anthropoids . In: Nature , Volume 467, 2010, pp. 1095-1098, cradle of humanity may not be Africa . welt.de, 2010
personal data
SURNAME Beard, K. Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beard, Kenneth Christopher (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1962